Posts by Gareth Morgan

As someone who has to make sure that a benefits calculator is kept up to date, I might be expected to have an interest in this.

Putting to one side the competence of designers and developers (far to one side), the whole project has been comprehensively shafted by political, rather than feature, creep. The original concept of a simple benefit, which was welcomed by benefits professionals, has been replaced by an increasingly complex and, in parts, unworkable system. A top-down design always has this potential danger, as detail is implemented, but in the case of Universal Credit that has been associated with rule changes, almost all of which have introduced new complexities. Most of these have been aimed at reducing entitlement, not just by lowering rates or qualifications, but by introducing sanctions and other time based limits. Add to this localisation and devolution, Treasury ignorance and HMRC's core place in the development of bottle-necks and all is clearly going to go to plan.

The people who are going to suffer at the end of this are not just those who don't, as IDS said, vote Tory. The worst hit will be the growing number of low earning self-employed who will face a complex, monthly nightmare of reporting their accounts to DWP, having a higher notional income than their real earnings, limited carry forward of losses and their 6 months previous earnings used to reduce their current benefit.

A bit of understatement

"However, IDS confessed last week that the target could no longer be reached as at least 700,000 people seeking Employment Support Allowance will still be absent from the new system a little over three years from now."

So they'll just need to keep one old system running for a while longer then ..... unless ... perhaps .... he wasn't being .... quite as open as he might have been ....

because people claiming ESA might have children, so the child tax credit system will have to be kept running by HMRC, who will also have to carry on running working tax credit for those who were working before becoming sick or with working partners. Some of these ESA claimants might be paying rent so that will mean that housing benefit will have to continue - in every local authority in the UK - as well.

Then there are the major changes to means-tested benefits for older people, which hinge around the introduction of single-tier pensions in 2016, and which have to be coordinated with Universal Credit timetables because of rule changes on age and many other reasons. I wonder (whistles innocently) what might be happening around IT development for the two new pension credit schemes due to start then?

Quis custodiet... ?

My own experience, sadly now lengthy, seems to imply an inversely proportional relationship between need and specification. Where there is a real urgency for a solution then government procurement is prepared to listen to new ideas but in the absence of that need then the relationship is simply one where the buyer tells the supplier what the solution is to be and no new thinking is welcome.

19c Snipers

Bigger and Better

I used to have a Torch. CP/M with a BBC hidden inside it and switchable. I even had a 20mb HD as well as 2 5.25 floppies. After that I had a Torch XXX Unix box which was wonderful, even the GUI. Shame there was no software to run on it.

Menus

Real computers

I started with a Northstar and then moved onto a Superbrain - with *two* floppy drives (and an unfortunate experience with a Gemini S100 machine).

We laughed scornfully at Pet owners as we spent hours trying to work out the cabling for RS232 dot-matrix printers. No games for us (except Zork of course), we were running social security calculations written in Z80 Cobol.